Existentialism

Like “rationalism” and “empiricism,”
“existentialism” is a term that belongs to intellectual
history. Its definition is thus to some extent one of historical
convenience. The term was explicitly adopted as a self-description by
Jean-Paul Sartre, and through the wide dissemination of the postwar
literary and philosophical output of Sartre and his
associates—notably Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
and Albert Camus—existentialism became identified with a
cultural movement that flourished in Europe in the 1940s and
1950s. Among the major philosophers identified as existentialists
(many of whom—for instance Camus and Heidegger—repudiated
the label) were Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, and Martin Buber in
Germany, Jean Wahl and Gabriel Marcel in France, the Spaniards
José Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Unamuno, and the Russians
Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov. The nineteenth century philosophers,
Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, came to be seen as
precursors of the movement. Existentialism was as much a literary
phenomenon as a philosophical one. Sartre's own ideas were and are
better known through his fictional works (such as Nausea
and No Exit) than through his more purely philosophical ones
(such as Being and Nothingness and Critique of
Dialectical Reason), and the postwar years found a very diverse
coterie of writers and artists linked under the term: retrospectively,
Dostoevsky, Ibsen, and Kafka were conscripted; in Paris there were
Jean Genet, André Gide, André Malraux, and the
expatriate Samuel Beckett; the Norwegian Knut Hamsun and the Romanian
Eugene Ionesco belong to the club; artists such as Alberto Giacometti
and even Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Arshile
Gorky, and Willem de Kooning, and filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard
and Ingmar Bergman were understood in existential terms. By the mid
1970s the cultural image of existentialism had become a cliché,
parodized in countless books and films by Woody Allen.

It is sometimes suggested, therefore, that existentialism just is this
bygone cultural movement rather than an identifiable philosophical
position; or, alternatively, that the term should be restricted to
Sartre's philosophy alone. But while a philosophical definition of
existentialism may not entirely ignore the cultural fate of the term,
and while Sartre's thought must loom large in any account of
existentialism, the concept does pick out a distinctive cluster of
philosophical problems and helpfully identifies a relatively distinct
current of twentieth- and now twenty-first-century philosophical
inquiry, one that has had significant impact on fields such as
theology (through Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, and
others) and psychology (from Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss to Otto
Rank, R. D. Laing, and Viktor Frankl). What makes this current of
inquiry distinct is not its concern with “existence” in
general, but rather its claim that thinking about human
existence requires new categories not found in the conceptual
repertoire of ancient or modern thought; human beings can be
understood neither as substances with fixed properties, nor as
subjects interacting with a world of objects.

On the existential view, to understand what a human being is it is not
enough to know all the truths that natural science—including the
science of psychology—could tell us. The dualist who holds that
human beings are composed of independent
substances—“mind” and “body”—is no
better off in this regard than is the physicalist, who holds that
human existence can be adequately explained in terms of the
fundamental physical constituents of the universe. Existentialism does
not deny the validity of the basic categories of physics, biology,
psychology, and the other sciences (categories such as matter,
causality, force, function, organism, development, motivation, and so
on). It claims only that human beings cannot be fully understood in
terms of them. Nor can such an understanding be gained by
supplementing our scientific picture with a moral
one. Categories of moral theory such as intention, blame,
responsibility, character, duty, virtue, and the like do
capture important aspects of the human condition, but neither moral
thinking (governed by the norms of the good and the right) nor
scientific thinking (governed by the norm of truth)
suffices.

“Existentialism”, therefore, may be defined as the
philosophical theory which holds that a further set of categories,
governed by the norm of authenticity, is necessary to grasp
human existence. To approach existentialism in this categorial way may
seem to conceal what is often taken to be its “heart”
(Kaufmann 1968: 12), namely, its character as a gesture of protest
against academic philosophy, its anti-system sensibility, its flight
from the “iron cage” of reason. But while it is true that
the major existential philosophers wrote with a passion and urgency
rather uncommon in our own time, and while the idea that philosophy
cannot be practiced in the disinterested manner of an objective
science is indeed central to existentialism, it is equally true that
all the themes popularly associated with existentialism—dread,
boredom, alienation, the absurd, freedom, commitment, nothingness, and
so on—find their philosophical significance in the context of
the search for a new categorial framework, together with its governing
norm.

Sartre's existentialism drew its immediate inspiration from the work
of the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger's
1927 Being and Time, an inquiry into the “being that we
ourselves are” (which he termed “Dasein,” a German
word for existence), introduced most of the motifs that would
characterize later existentialist thinking: the tension between the
individual and the “public”; an emphasis on the worldly or
“situated” character of human thought and reason; a
fascination with liminal experiences of anxiety, death, the
“nothing” and nihilism; the rejection of science (and
above all, causal explanation) as an adequate framework for
understanding human being; and the introduction of
“authenticity” as the norm of self-identity, tied to the
project of self-definition through freedom, choice, and
commitment. Though in 1946 Heidegger would repudiate the retrospective
labelling of his earlier work as existentialism, it is in that work
that the relevant concept of existence finds its first
systematic philosophical
formulation.[1]

As Sartre and Merleau-Ponty would later do, Heidegger pursued these
issues with the somewhat unlikely resources of Edmund Husserl's
phenomenological method. And while not all existential philosophers
were influenced by phenomenology (for instance Jaspers and Marcel), the
philosophical legacy of existentialism is largely tied to the form it
took as an existential version of phenomenology. Husserl's efforts in
the first decades of the twentieth century had been directed toward
establishing a descriptive science of consciousness, by which he
understood not the object of the natural science of psychology but the
“transcendental” field of intentionality, i.e., that whereby our
experience is meaningful, an experience of something
as something. The existentialists welcomed Husserl's doctrine
of intentionality as a refutation of the Cartesian view according to
which consciousness relates immediately only to its own
representations, ideas, sensations. According to Husserl, consciousness
is our direct openness to the world, one that is governed categorially
(normatively) rather than causally; that is, intentionality is not a
property of the individual mind but the categorial framework in which
mind and world become
intelligible.[2]

A phenomenology of consciousness, then, explores neither the
metaphysical composition nor the causal genesis of things, but the
“constitution” of their meaning. Husserl employed this method to
clarify our experience of nature, the socio-cultural world, logic, and
mathematics, but Heidegger argued that he had failed to raise the most
fundamental question, that of the “meaning of being” as such. In
turning phenomenology toward the question of what it means to
be, Heidegger insists that the question be raised
concretely: it is not at first some academic exercise but a
burning concern arising from life itself, the question of what it
means for me to be. Existential themes take on salience when
one sees that the general question of the meaning of being involves
first becoming clear about one's own being as an inquirer. According
to Heidegger, the categories bequeathed by the philosophical tradition
for understanding a being who can question his or her being
are insufficient: traditional concepts of a substance decked out with
reason, or of a subject blessed with self-consciousness, misconstrue
our fundamental character as “being-in-the-world.” In his
phenomenological pursuit of the categories that govern
being-in-the-world, Heidegger became the reluctant father of
existentialism because he drew inspiration from two seminal, though in
academic circles then relatively unknown, nineteenth-century writers,
Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. One can find
anticipations of existential thought in many places (for instance, in
Socratic irony, Augustine, Pascal, or the late Schelling), but the
roots of the problem of existence in its contemporary significance lie
in the work of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

Kierkegaard developed this problem in the context of his radical
approach to Christian faith; Nietzsche did so in light of his thesis
of the death of God. Subsequent existential thought reflects this
difference: while some writers—such as Sartre and
Beauvoir—were resolutely atheist in outlook, others—such
as Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel, and Buber—variously explored the
implications of the concept “authentic existence” for
religious consciousness. Though neither Nietzsche's nor Kierkegaard's
thought can be reduced to a single strand, both took an interest in
what Kierkegaard termed “the single individual.” Both were
convinced that this singularity, what is most my own,
“me,” could be meaningfully reflected upon while yet,
precisely because of its singularity, remain invisible to
traditional philosophy, with its emphasis either on what follows
unerring objective laws of nature or else conforms to the universal
standards of moral reason. A focus on existence thus led, in both, to
unique textual strategies quite alien to the philosophy of their
time.

In Kierkegaard, the singularity of existence comes to light at the
moment of conflict between ethics and religious faith. Suppose it is my
sense of doing God's will that makes my life meaningful. How does
philosophy conceive this meaning? Drawing here on Hegel as emblematic
of the entire tradition, Kierkegaard, in his book Fear and
Trembling, argues that for philosophy my life becomes meaningful
when I “raise myself to the universal” by bringing my immediate
(natural) desires and inclinations under the moral law, which
represents my “telos” or what I ought to be. In doing so I
lose my individuality (since the law holds for all) but my
actions become meaningful in the sense of understandable, governed by
a norm. Now a person whose sense of doing God's will is what gives her
life meaning will be intelligible just to the extent that her action
conforms to the universal dictates of ethics. But what if, as in case
of Abraham's sacrifice of his son, the action contradicts what ethics
demands?
Kierkegaard[3]
believes both that Abraham's life is supremely meaningful
(it is not simply a matter of some immediate desire or meaningless tic
that overcomes Abraham's ethical consciousness; on the contrary, doing
the moral thing is
itself in this case his tempting inclination) and
that philosophy cannot understand it, thus condemning it in the name of
ethics. God's command here cannot be seen as a law that would pertain
to all; it addresses Abraham in his singularity. If Abraham's life is
meaningful, it represents, from a philosophical point of view, the
“paradox” that through faith the “single individual is higher than the
universal.” Existence as a philosophical problem appears at this point:
if there is a dimension to my being that is both meaningful and yet not
governed by the rational standard of morality, by what standard
is it governed? For unless there is some standard it is idle
to speak of “meaning.”

To solve this problem there must be a norm inherent in singularity
itself, and, in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript,
Kierkegaard tries to express such a norm in his claim that
“subjectivity is the truth,” an idea that prefigures the
existential concept of authenticity. Abraham has no objective reason
to think that the command he hears comes from God; indeed, based on
the content of the command he has every reason, as Kant pointed out
in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, to think that
it cannot come from God. His sole justification is what
Kierkegaard calls the passion of faith. Such faith is,
rationally speaking, absurd, a “leap,” so if there is to
be any talk of truth here it is a standard that measures not
the content of Abraham's act, but the way in which he
accomplishes it. To perform the movement of faith
“subjectively” is to embrace the paradox as normative for
me in spite of its absurdity, rather than to seek an escape from it by
means of objective textual exegesis, historical criticism, or some
other strategy for translating the singularity of my situation into
the universal. Because my reason cannot help here, the normative
appropriation is a function of my “inwardness” or
passion. In this way I “truly” become what I nominally
already am. To say that subjectivity is the truth is to highlight a
way of being, then, and not a mode of knowing; truth measures the
attitude (“passion”) with which I appropriate, or make my
own, an “objective uncertainty” (the voice of God) in a
“process of highest inwardness.”

In contrast to the singularity of this movement, for Kierkegaard,
stands the crowd: “the crowd is untruth.” The crowd is,
roughly, public opinion in the widest sense—the ideas that a
given age takes for granted; the ordinary and accepted way of doing
things; the complacent attitude that comes from the conformity
necessary for social life—and what condemns it to
“untruth” in Kierkegaard's eyes is the way that it
insinuates itself into an individual's own sense of who she is,
relieving her of the burden of being herself: if everyone is a
Christian there is no need for me to “become” one. Since
it is a measure not of knowing but of being, one can see how
Kierkegaard answers those who object that his concept of subjectivity
as truth is based on an equivocation: the objective truths of science
and history, however well-established, are in themselves matters of
indifference; they belong to the crowd. It is not insofar as
truth can be established objectively that it takes on meaning, but
rather insofar as it is appropriated “passionately” in its
very uncertainty. To “exist” is always to be confronted
with this question of meaning. The truths that matter to who one is
cannot, like Descartes' morale definitif, be something to be
attained only when objective science has completed its task.

For Kierkegaard existence emerges as a philosophical problem in the
struggle to think the paradoxical presence of God; for Nietzsche it is
found in the reverberations of the phrase “God is dead,” in the
challenge of nihilism.

Responding in part to the cultural situation in nineteenth-century
Europe—historical scholarship continuing to erode
fundamentalist readings of the Bible, the growing cultural capital of
the natural sciences, and Darwinism in particular—and in part
driven by his own investigations into the psychology and history of
moral concepts, Nietzsche sought to draw the consequences of the death
of God, the collapse of any theistic support for morality. Like his
contemporary, Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose character, Ivan, in The
Brothers Karamazov, famously argues that if God does not exist
then everything is permitted, Nietzsche's overriding concern is to find
a way to take the measure of human life in the modern world. Unlike
Dostoevsky, however, Nietzsche sees a complicity between morality and
the Christian God that perpetuates a life-denying, and so ultimately
nihilistic, stance. Nietzsche was not the first to de-couple morality
from its divine sanction; psychological theories of the moral
sentiments, developed since the eighteenth century, provided a purely
human account of moral normativity. But while these earlier theories
had been offered as justifications of the normative force of
morality, Nietzsche's idea that behind moral prescriptions lies nothing
but “will to power” undermined that authority. On the account given in
On the Genealogy of Morals, the Judeo-Christian moral order
arose as an expression of the ressentiment of the weak against
the power exercised over them by the strong. A tool used to thwart that
power, it had over time become internalized in the form of conscience,
creating a “sick” animal whose will is at war with its own vital
instincts. Thus Nietzsche arrived at Kierkegaard's idea that “the crowd
is untruth”: the so-called autonomous, self-legislating individual is
nothing but a herd animal that has trained itself to docility and
unfreedom by conforming to the “universal” standards of morality. The
normative is nothing but the normal.

Yet this is not the end of the story for Nietzsche, any more than it
was for Kierkegaard. If the autonomous individual has so far signified
nothing but herd mentality—if moral norms arose precisely to
produce such conformists—the individual nevertheless has the
potential to become something else, the sick animal is “pregnant
with a future.” Nietzsche saw that in the nineteenth century the
“highest values” had begun to “devalue
themselves.” For instance, the Christian value of truth-telling,
institutionalized in the form of science, had undermined the belief in
God, disenchanting the world and excluding from it any pre-given moral
meaning. In such a situation the individual is forced back upon
himself. On the one hand, if he is weakly constituted he may fall
victim to despair in the face of nihilism, the recognition that life
has no instrinsic meaning. On the other hand, for a
“strong” or creative individual nihilism presents a
liberating opportunity to take responsibility for meaning, to exercise
creativity by “transvaluing” her values, establishing a
new “order of rank.” Through his prophet, Zarathustra,
Nietzsche imagined such a person as the “overman”
(Übermensch), the one who teaches “the meaning of
the earth” and has no need of otherworldly supports for the
values he embodies. The overman represents a form of life, a mode of
existence, that is to blossom from the communalized, moralized
“last man” of the nineteenth century. He has understood
that nihilism is the ultimate meaning of the moral point of view, its
life-denying essence, and he reconfigures the moral idea of autonomy
so as to release the life-affirming potential within it.

Thus, for Nietzsche, existence emerges as a philosophical problem in
his distinction between moral autonomy (as obedience to the moral law)
and an autonomy “beyond good and evil.” But if one is to
speak of autonomy, meaning, and value at all, the mode of being beyond
good and evil cannot simply be a lawless state of arbitrary and
impulsive behavior. If such existence is to be thinkable there must be
a standard by which success or failure can be measured. Nietzsche
variously indicates such a standard in his references to
“health,” “strength,” and “the meaning
of the earth.” Perhaps his most instructive indication, however,
comes from aesthetics, since its concept of
style, as elaborated in The Gay Science, provides a
norm appropriate to the singularity of existence. To say that a work of
art has style is to invoke a standard for judging it, but one that
cannot be specified in the form of a general law of which the work
would be a mere instance. Rather, in a curious way, the norm is
internal to the work. For Nietzsche, existence falls under such an
imperative of style: to create meaning and value in a world from which
all transcendent supports have fallen away is to give unique shape to
one's immediate inclinations, drives, and passions; to interpret,
prune, and enhance according to a unifying sensibility, a ruling
instinct, that brings everything into a whole that satisfies the
non-conceptual, aesthetic norm of what fits, what belongs, what is
appropriate.

As did Kierkegaard, then, Nietzsche uncovers an aspect of my being
that can be understood neither in terms of immediate drives and
inclinations nor in terms of a universal law of behavior, an aspect
that is measured not in terms of an objective inventory of
what I am but in terms of my way of being it. Neither
Kierkegaard nor Nietzsche, however, developed this insight in a fully
systematic way. That would be left to their twentieth-century
heirs.

Sartre's slogan—“existence precedes
essence”—may serve to introduce what is most distinctive
of existentialism, namely, the idea that no general, non-formal
account of what it means to be human can be given, since that meaning
is decided in and through existing itself. Existence is
“self-making-in-a-situation” (Fackenheim 1961: 37). In
contrast to other entities, whose essential properties are fixed by
the kind of entities they are, what is essential to a human
being—what makes her who she is—is not fixed by
her type but by what she makes of herself, who she
becomes.[4]
The
fundamental contribution of existential thought lies in the idea that
one's identity is constituted neither by nature nor by culture, since
to “exist” is precisely to constitute such an identity. It
is in light of this idea that key existential notions such as
facticity, transcendence (project), alienation, and authenticity must
be understood.

At first, it seems hard to understand how one can say much about
existence as such. Traditionally, philosophers have connected the
concept of existence with that of essence in such a way that the
former signifies merely the instantiation of the latter. If
“essence” designates what a thing is and
“existence” that it is, it follows that what is
intelligible about any given thing, what can be thought about it, will
belong to its essence. It is from essence in this sense—say,
human being as rational animal or imago Dei—that
ancient philosophy drew its prescriptions for an individual's way of
life, its estimation of the meaning and value of existence. Having an
essence meant that human beings could be placed within a larger whole,
a kosmos, that provided the standard for human
flourishing. Modern philosophy retained this framework even as it
abandoned the idea of a “natural place” for man in the
face of the scientific picture of an infinite, labyrinthine
universe. In what looks like a proto-existential move, Descartes
rejected the traditional essential definitions of man in favor of a
radical, first-person reflection on his own existence, the “I
am.” Nevertheless, he quickly reinstated the old model by
characterizing his existence as that of a substance determined by an
essential property, “thinking.” In contrast, Heidegger
proposes that “I” am “an entity whose what [essence]
is precisely to be and nothing but to be” (Heidegger 1985: 110;
1962: 67). Such an entity's existing cannot, therefore, be thought as
the instantiation of an essence, and consequently what it means to be
such an entity cannot be determined by appeal to pre-given frameworks
or systems—whether scientific, historical, or philosophical.

Of course, there is a sense in which human beings do instantiate
essences, as Heidegger's phrase already
admits.[5]
But what matters for existential thought is the manner of
such instantiation, the
way of existing. What this means can be seen by contrasting
human existence with the modes of being Heidegger terms the
“available” (or
“ready-to-hand,” zuhanden) and the
“occurrent” (or
“present-at-hand,” vorhanden). Entities of the
first sort, exemplified by tools as they present themselves in use,
are defined by the social practices in which they are employed, and
their properties are established in relation to the norms of those
practices. A saw is sharp, for instance, in relation to what counts as
successful cutting. Entities of the second sort, exemplified by
objects of perceptual contemplation or scientific investigation, are
defined by the norms governing perceptual givenness or scientific
theory-construction. An available or occurrent entity instantiates
some property if that property is truly predicated of it. Human beings
can be considered in this way as well. However, in contrast to the
previous cases, the fact that natural and social properties can truly
be predicated of human beings is not sufficient to determine what it
is for me to be a human being. This, the existentialists
argue, is because such properties are never merely brute
determinations of who I am but are always in question. Who I am
depends on what I make of my “properties”; they
matter to me in a way that is impossible for merely available and
occurrent entities. As Heidegger puts it, existence is
“care” (Sorge): to exist is not simply to be, but
to be an
issue for oneself. In Sartre's terms, while other entities
exist “in themselves” (en soi) and “are
what they are,” human reality is also “for itself”
(pour soi) and thus is not exhausted by any of its
determinations. It is what it is not and is not what it is (Sartre
1992: 112).

Human existence, then, cannot be thought through categories
appropriate to things: substance, event, process. There is something
of an internal distinction in existence that undermines such attempts,
a distinction that existential philosophers try to capture in the
categories of “facticity” and “transcendence.”
To be is to co-ordinate these opposed moments in some way, and who I
am, my essence, is nothing but my manner of co-ordinating
them. In this sense human beings make themselves in situation: what I
am cannot be separated from what I take myself to be. In
Charles Taylor's phrase, human beings are “self-interpreting
animals” (Taylor 1985: 45), where the interpretation is
constitutive of the interpreter. If such a view is not to collapse
into contradiction the notions of facticity and transcendence must be
elucidated. Risking some oversimplification, they can be approached as
the correlates of the two attitudes I can take toward myself: the
attitude of third-person theoretical observer and the attitude of
first-person practical agent.

Facticity includes all those properties that third-person
investigation can establish about me: natural properties such as
weight, height, and skin color; social facts such as race, class, and
nationality; psychological properties such as my web of belief,
desires, and character traits; historical facts such as my past
actions, my family background, and my broader historical milieu; and so
on.[6]
I am not originally aware of my facticity in this third-person way;
rather, it is manifest in my moods as a kind of burden, the weight of
“having to be.” However, I can adopt a third-person or
objectifying stance toward my own being, and then these aspects of my
facticity may appear precisely as that which defines or determines who
I am. From an existential point of view, however, this would be an
error—not because these aspects of my being are not
real or factual, but because the kind of being that I am
cannot be defined in factual, or third-person,
terms.[7]
These
elements of facticity cannot be said to belong to me in the way that
the color of an apple belongs to the apple, for as belonging
to me, as “determining” me, they have always already been
interpreted by me. Though third-person observation can
identify skin color, class, or ethnicity, the minute it seeks to
identify them as mine it must contend with the distinctive
character of the existence I possess. There is no sense in which
facticity is both mine and merely a matter of fact, since my
existence—the kind of being I am—is also defined by the
stance I take toward my facticity. This is what existential
philosophers call “transcendence.”

Transcendence refers to that attitude toward myself characteristic of
my practical engagement in the world, the agent's perspective. An
agent is oriented by the task at hand as something to be brought about
through its own will or agency. Such orientation does not take itself
as a theme but loses itself in what is to be done. Thereby, things
present themselves not as indifferent givens, facts, but as
meaningful: salient, expedient, obstructive, and so on. To speak of
“transcendence” here is to indicate that the agent
“goes beyond” what simply is toward what can be: the
factual—including the agent's own properties—always
emerges in light of the possible, where the possible is not a function
of anonymous forces (third-person or logical possibility) but a
function of the agent's choice and
decision.[8]
Just as this suddenly empty pen is either a nettlesome impediment to
my finishing this article, or a welcome occasion for doing something
else, depending on how I determine my behavior in relation to it, so
too my own factic properties—such as irrascibility, laziness, or
bourgeois workaholism—take on meaning (become functioning
reasons) on the basis of how I endorse or disavow them in the present
action.

Existentialists tend to describe the perspective of engaged agency
in terms of “choice,” and they are sometimes criticized for this. It
may be—the argument runs—that I can be said to choose a
course of action at the conclusion of a process of deliberation, but
there seems to be no choice involved when, in the heat of the moment, I
toss the useless pen aside in frustration. Can its being useless be
traced back to my “choice” to be frustrated? But the point in using
such language is simply to insist that in the first-person perspective
of agency I cannot conceive myself as determined by anything
that is available to me only in third-person terms. Behind the
existentialist's insistence that facticity and transcendence remain
irreducible aspects of one and the same being is the insight that, for
a being who can say “I,” the third-person perspective on who one is has
no more authority than the first-person (agent's)
perspective.[9]

Because existence is co-constituted by facticity and transcendence,
the self cannot be conceived as a Cartesian ego but is embodied
being-in-the-world, a self-making in situation. It is through
transcendence—or what the existentialists also refer to as my
“projects”—that the world is revealed, takes on
meaning; but such projects are themselves factic or
“situated”—not the product of some antecedently
constituted “person” or intelligible character but
embedded in a world that is decidedly not my representation. Because
my projects are who I am in the mode of engaged agency (and
not like plans that I merely represent to myself in reflective
deliberation), the world in a certain sense reveals to me who I
am. For reasons to be explored in the next section, the meaning of my
choice is not always transparent to me. Nevertheless, because it
necessarily reveals the world in a certain way, that meaning, my own
“identity,” can be discovered by what Sartre calls
“existential psychoanalysis.” By understanding an
individual's patterns of behavior—that is, by reconstructing the
meaningful world that such behavior reveals—one can uncover the
“fundamental project” or basic choice of oneself that
gives distinctive shape to an individual life. Existential psychoanalysis
represents a kind of compromise between the first- and third-person
perspectives: like the latter, it objectifies the person and treats
its open-ended practical horizons as in a certain sense closed; like
the former, however, it seeks to understand the choices from the
inside, to grasp the identity of the individual as a matter of the
first-person meaning that haunts him, rather than as a function of
inert psychic mechanisms with which the individual has no
acquaintance.[10]

The anti-Cartesian view of the self as in situation yields the
familiar existential theme of the “alienated” self, the estrangement of
the self both from the world and from itself. In the first place,
though it is through my projects that world takes on meaning, the world
itself is not brought into being through my projects; it retains its
otherness and thus can come forth as utterly alien, as
unheimlich. Sometimes translated as “uncanny,” this
Heideggerian word's stem (Heim, “home”) points, instead, to
the strangeness of a world in which I precisely do not feel
“at home.” (see the section on
The Ideality of Values
below). This experience,
basic to existential thought, contrasts most sharply with the ancient
notion of a kosmos in which human beings have a well-ordered
place, and it connects existential thought tightly to the modern
experience of a meaningless universe.

In the second place, the world includes other people, and as a
consequence I am not merely the revealer of the world but something
revealed in the projects of those others. Thus who I am is not merely
a function of my own projects, but is also a matter of my
“being-for-others.” Sartre (1992: 340-58) brings out this
form of alienation in his famous analysis of “the Look.”
So long as I am engaged unreflectively in a certain practice I am
nothing but that first-person perspective which constitutes things as
having a distinctive salience in light of what I am doing. I am
absorbed in the world and do not experience myself as having an
“outside”; that is, I do not understand my action through
some third-person description, as an instance of some general
behavior. However, when I become aware of being looked at (that is,
when my subjectivity is invaded by the subjectivity of another for
whom I am merely part of the world, an item for her projects ), I
become aware of having a “nature,” a
“character,” of being or doing something. I am
not merely looking through a keyhole; I am a voyeur. I cannot
originally experience myself
as something—a voyeur, for instance. Only the other can
give rise to this mode of my being, a mode that I acknowledge as
mine (and not merely the other's opinion of me) in the
shame in which I register it. It is because there are others
in the world that I can take a third-person perspective on myself; but
this reveals the extent to which I am alienated from a
dimension of my being: who I am in an objective sense can be originally
revealed only by the Other. This has implications for existential
social theory (see the section on
Sartre: Existentialism and Marxism
below).

Finally, the self-understanding, or project, thanks to which the world
is there for me in a meaningful way, already belongs to that world,
derives from it, from the tradition or society in which I find
myself. Though it is “me,” it is not me “as my
own.” My very engagement in the world alienates me from my
authentic possibility. This theme is brought out most clearly by
Heidegger: the anti-Cartesian idea that the self is defined first of
all by its practical engagement entails that this self is not properly
individual but rather indisinguishable from anyone else (das
Man) who engages in such practices: such a
“they-self” does what “one” does. The idea is
something like this: Practices can allow things to show up as
meaningful—as hammers, dollar bills, or artworks—because
practices involve aims that carry with them norms, satisfaction
conditions, for what shows up in them. But norms and rules, as
Wittgenstein has shown, are essentially public, and that means that
when I engage in practices I must be essentially interchangeable with
anyone else who does: I eat as one eats; I drive as one drives; I even
protest as one protests. To the extent that my activity is to be an
instance of such a practice, I must do it in the normal
way. Deviations can be recognized as deviations only against this
norm, and if they deviate too far they can't be recognized at
all.[11] Thus,
if who I am is defined through existing, this “who” is
normally pre-defined by what is average, by the roles available to me
in my culture, and so on. The “I” that gets defined is
thereby “anonymous,” or “anyone”; self-making
is largely a function of not distinguishing myself from
others.

If there is nevertheless good sense in talking of the singularity of
my existence, it will not be something with which one starts but
something that gets achieved in recovering oneself from
alienation or lostness in the “crowd.” If the normative is
first of all the normal, however, it might seem that talk about a norm
for the
singularity of existence, a standard for thinking about what
is my ownmost just as I myself, would be incoherent. It is
here that the idea of “authenticity” must come into focus.

By what standard are we to think our efforts “to be,” our
manner of being a self? If such standards traditionally derive from
the essence that a particular thing instantiates—this hammer is
a good one if it instantiates what a hammer is supposed to
be—and if there is nothing that a human being is, by its
essence, supposed to be, can the meaning of existence at all
be thought? Existentialism arises with the collapse of the idea that
philosophy can provide substantive norms for existing, ones that
specify particular ways of life. Nevertheless, there remains the
distinction between what I do “as” myself and as
“anyone,” so in this sense existing is something at which
I can succeed or fail. Authenticity—in German,
Eigentlichkeit—names that attitude in which I engage
in my projects as my own (eigen).

What this means can perhaps be brought out by considering moral
evaluations. In keeping my promise I act in accord with duty; and if I
keep it because it is my duty, I also act morally (according
to Kant) because I am acting for the sake of duty. But
existentially there is still a further evaluation to be made. My moral
act is inauthentic if, in keeping my promise for the sake of
duty, I do so because that is what “one” does (what
“moral people” do). But I can do the same
thing authentically if, in keeping my promise for the sake of
duty, acting this way is something I choose
as my own, something to which, apart from its social sanction,
I commit myself. Similarly, doing the right thing from a fixed and
stable character—which virtue ethics considers a condition of
the good—is not beyond the reach of existential evaluation:
such character may simply be a product of my tendency to “do what one
does,” including feeling “the right way” about things and betaking
myself in appropriate ways as one is expected to do. But such character
might also be a reflection of my choice of myself, a
commitment I make to be a person of this sort. In both cases I
have succeeded in being good; only in the latter case, however, have I
succeeded in being
myself.[12]

Thus the norm of authenticity refers to a kind of “transparency”
with regard to my situation, a recognition that I am a being who
can be responsible for who I am. In choosing in light of this
norm I can be said to recover myself from alienation, from my
absorption in the anonymous “one-self” that characterizes me in my
everyday engagement in the world. Authenticity thus indicates a certain
kind of integrity—not that of a pre-given whole, an identity
waiting to be discovered, but that of a project to which I can either
commit myself (and thus “become” what it entails) or else simply occupy
for a time, inauthentically drifting in and out of various affairs.
Some writers have taken this notion a step further, arguing that the
measure of an authentic life lies in the integrity of a
narrative, that to be a self is to constitute a story in which
a kind of wholeness prevails, to be the author of oneself as a unique
individual (Nehamas 1998; Ricoeur 1992). In contrast, the inauthentic
life would be one without such integrity, one in which I allow my
life-story to be dictated by the world. Be that as it may, it is clear
that one can commit oneself to a life of chamealeon-like variety, as
does Don Juan in Kierkegaard's version of the legend. Even interpreted
narratively, then, the norm of authenticity remains a formal one. As
with Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith, one cannot tell who is authentic by
looking at the content of their
lives.[13]

Authenticity defines a condition on self-making: do I succeed in
making myself, or will who I am merely be a function of the
roles I find myself in? Thus to be authentic can also be thought as a
way of being autonomous. In choosing “resolutely”—that is, in
commiting myself to a certain course of action, a certain way of being
in the world—I have given myself the rule that belongs to the
role I come to adopt. The inauthentic person, in contrast, merely
occupies such a role, and may do so “irresolutely,” without
commitment. Being a father authentically does not necessarily make me a
better father, but what it means to be a father has become
explicitly my concern. It is here that existentialism locates
the singularity of existence and identifies what is irreducible in the
first-person stance. At the same time, authenticity does not hold out
some specific way of life as a norm; that is, it does not distinguish
between the projects that I might choose. Instead, it governs the
manner in which I am engaged in such projects—either as “my
own” or as “what one does,” transparently or opaquely.

Thus existentialism's focus on authenticity leads to a distinctive
stance toward ethics and value-theory generally. The possibility of
authenticity is a mark of my freedom, and it is through
freedom that existentialism approaches questions of value, leading to
many of its most recognizable doctrines.

Existentialism did not develop much in the way of a normative
ethics; however, a certain approach to the theory of value and to moral
psychology, deriving from the idea of existence as self-making in
situation, are distinctive marks of the existentialist tradition. In
value theory, existentialists tend to emphasize the conventionality or
groundlessness of values, their “ideality,” the fact that they arise
entirely through the projects of human beings against the background of
an otherwise meaningless and indifferent world. Existential moral
psychology emphasizes human freedom and focuses on the sources of
mendacity, self-deception, and hypocrisy in moral consciousness. The
familiar existential themes of anxiety, nothingness, and the absurd
must be understood in this context. At the same time, there is deep
concern to foster an authentic stance toward the human, groundless,
values without which no project is possible, a concern that gets
expressed in the notions of “engagement” and
“commitment.”[14]

As a predicate of existence, the concept of freedom is not initially
established on the basis of arguments against determinism; nor is it,
in Kantian fashion, taken simply as a given of practical
self-consciousness. Rather, it is located in the breakdown of
direct practical activity. The “evidence” of freedom is a
matter neither of theoretical nor of practical consciousness but
arises from the self-understanding that accompanies a
certain mood into which I may fall, namely, anxiety
(Angst, angoisse). Both Heidegger and Sartre
believe that phenomenological analysis of the kind of intentionality
that belongs to moods does not merely register a passing modification
of the psyche but reveals fundamental aspects of the self. Fear, for
instance, reveals some region of the world as threatening, some
element in it as a threat, and myself as vulnerable. In anxiety, as
in fear, I grasp myself as threatened or as vulnerable; but unlike
fear, anxiety has no direct object, there is nothing in the world that
is threatening. This is because anxiety pulls me altogether out of the
circuit of those projects thanks to which things are there for me in
meaningful ways; I can no longer “gear into” the
world. And with this collapse of my practical immersion in roles and
projects, I also lose the basic sense of who I am that is provided by
these roles. In thus robbing me of the possibility of practical
self-identification, anxiety teaches me that I do not coincide with
anything that I factically am. Further, since the identity bound up
with such roles and practices is always typical and public, the
collapse of this identity reveals an ultimately first-personal aspect
of myself that is irreducible to das Man. As Heidegger puts
it, anxiety testifies to a kind of “existential
solipsism.” It is this reluctant, because disorienting and
dispossessing, retreat into myself in anxiety that yields the
existential figure of the outsider, the isolated one who “sees
through” the phoniness of those who, unaware of what the
breakdown of anxiety portends, live their lives complacently
identifying with their roles as though these roles thoroughly defined
them. While this “outsider” stance may be easy to ridicule
as adolescent self-absorption, it is also solidly supported by the
phenomenology (or moral psychology) of first-person experience.

The experience of anxiety also yields the existential theme of the
absurd, a version of what was previously introduced as
alienation from the world (see the section on
Alienation
above). So
long as I am gearing into the world practically, in a seamless and
absorbed way, things present themselves as meaningfully co-ordinated
with the projects in which I am engaged; they show me the face that is
relevant to what I am doing. But the connection between these meanings
and my projects is not itself something that I experience. Rather, the
hammer's usefulness, its value as a hammer, appears simply to belong to
it in the same way that its weight or color does. So long as I am
practically engaged, in short, all things appear to have reasons for
being, and I, correlatively, experience myself as fully at home in the
world. The world has an order that is largely transparent to me (even
its mysteries are grasped simply as something for which there are
reasons that are there “for others,” for “experts,” merely beyond my
limited horizon). In the mood of anxiety, however, it is just this
character that fades from the world. Because I am no longer
practically engaged, the meaning that had previously inhabited the
thing as the density of its being now stares back at me as a mere
name, as something I “know” but which no longer claims me. As
when one repeats a word until it loses meaning, anxiety undermines the
taken-for-granted sense of things. They become absurd. Things
do not disappear, but all that remains of them is the blank recognition
that they are—an experience that informs a central
scene in Sartre's novel Nausea. As Roquentin sits in a park,
the root of a tree loses its character of familiarity until he is
overcome by nausea at its utterly alien character, its being en
soi. While such an experience is no more genuine than my
practical, engaged experience of a world of meaning, it is no
less genuine either. An existential account of meaning and
value must recognize both possibilities (and their
intermediaries). To do so is to acknowledge a certain absurdity to
existence: though reason and value have a foothold in the world (they
are not, after all, my arbitrary invention), they nevertheless lack any
ultimate foundation. Values are not intrinsic to being, and at some
point reasons give
out.[15]

Another term for the groundlessness of the world of meaning is
“nothingness.” Heidegger introduced this term to indicate the kind of
self- and world-understanding that emerges in anxiety: because my
practical identity is constituted by the practices I engage in, when
these collapse I “am” not anything. In a manner of speaking I am thus
brought face-to-face with my own finitude, my “death” as the
possibility in which I am no longer able to be anything. This
experience of my own death, or “nothingness,” in anxiety can act as a
spur to authenticity: I come to see that I “am” not anything but must
“make myself be” through my choice. In commiting myself in the
face of death—that is, aware of the nothingness of my identity
if not supported by me right up to the end—the roles that I
have hitherto thoughtlessly engaged in as one does now become something
that I myself own up to, become responsible for. Heidegger termed this
mode of self-awareness—awareness of the ultimate nothingness of
my practical identity—“freedom,” and Sartre developed this
existential concept of freedom in rich detail. This is not to say that
Heidegger's and Sartre's views on freedom are identical. Heidegger, for
instance, will emphasize that freedom is always “thrown” into an
historical situation from which it draws its possibilities, while
Sartre (who is equally aware of the “facticity” of our choices) will
emphasize that such “possibilities” nevertheless underdetermine choice.
But the theory of radical freedom that Sartre develops is nevertheless
directly rooted in Heidegger's account of the nothingness of my
practical identity.

Sartre (1992: 70) argues that anxiety provides a lucid experience of
that freedom which, though often concealed, characterizes human
existence as such. For him, freedom is the dislocation of consciousness
from its object, the fundamental “nihilation” or negation by means of
which consciousness can grasp its object without losing itself in it:
to be conscious of something is to be conscious of not being
it, a “not” that arises in the very structure of consciousness as being
for-itself. Because “nothingness” (or nihilation) is just what
consciousness is, there can be no objects in consciousness,
but only objects for
consciousness.[16]
This means that consciousness is radically free, since its structure
precludes that it either contain or be acted on by
things. For instance, because it is not thing-like, consciousness is
free with regard to its own prior states. Motives, instincts, psychic
forces, and the like cannot be understood as inhabitants of
consciousness that might infect freedom from within, inducing one to
act in ways for which one is not responsible; rather, they can exist
only for consciousness as matters of choice. I must either
reject their claims or avow them. For Sartre, the ontological freedom
of existence entails that determinism is an excuse before it
is a theory: though through its structure of nihilation consciousness
escapes that which would define it—including its own past
choices and behavior—there are times when I may wish to deny my
freedom. Thus I may attempt to constitute these aspects of my being as
objective “forces” which hold sway over me in the manner
of relations between things. This is to adopt the third-person stance
on myself, in which what is originally structured in terms of freedom
appears as a causal property of myself. I can try to look upon myself
as the Other does, but as an excuse this flight from freedom is shown
to fail, according to Sartre, in the experience
of anguish.

For instance, Sartre writes of a gambler who, after losing all and
fearing for himself and his family, retreats to the reflective behavior
of resolving never to gamble again. This motive thus enters into his
facticity as a choice he has made; and, as long as he retains his fear,
his living sense of himself as being threatened, it may appear to him
that this resolve actually has causal force in keeping him from
gambling. However, one evening he confronts the gaming tables and is
overcome with anguish at the recognition that his resolve, while still
“there,” retains none of its power: it is an object for
consciousness but is not (and never could have been) something
in consciousness that was determining his actions. In order
for it to influence his behavior he has to avow it afresh, but this is
just what he cannot do; indeed, just this is what he hoped the original
resolve would spare him from having to do. He will have to “remake” the
self who was in the original situation of fear and threat. At this
point, perhaps, he will try to relieve himself of freedom by giving in
to the urge to gamble and chalking it up to “deeper” motives that
overcame the initial resolve, problems from his childhood perhaps. But
anguish can recur with regard to this strategy as well—for
instance, if he needs a loan to continue gambling and must convince
someone that he is “as good as his word.” The possibilities for
self-deception in such cases are endless.

As Sartre points out in great detail, anguish, as the consciousness
of freedom, is not something that human beings welcome; rather, we seek
stability, identity, and adopt the language of freedom only when it
suits us: those acts are considered by me to be my free acts which
exactly match the self I want others to take me to be. We are
“condemned to be free,” which means that we can never simply
be who we are but are separated from ourselves by the
nothingness of having perpetually to re-choose, or re-commit, ourselves
to what we do. Characteristic of the existentialist outlook is the idea
that we spend much of lives devising strategies for denying or evading
the anguish of freedom. One of these strategies is “bad faith.” Another
is the appeal to values.

The idea that freedom is the origin of value—where freedom
is defined not in terms of acting rationally (Kant) but rather
existentially, as choice and transcendence—is the idea perhaps
most closely associated with existentialism. So influential was this
general outlook on value that Karl-Otto Apel (1973: 235) came to speak
of a kind of “official complementarity of existentialism and scientism”
in Western philosophy, according to which what can be justified
rationally falls under the “value-free objectivism of science” while
all other validity claims become matters for an “existential
subjectivism of religious faith and ethical decisions.” Positivism
attempted to provide a theory of “cognitive meaning” based on what it
took to be the inner logic of scientific thought, and it relegated
questions of value to cognitive meaninglessness, reducing them to
issues of emotive response and subjective preference. While it does not
explain evaluative language solely as a function of affective
attitudes, existential thought, like positivism, denies that values can
be grounded in being—that is, that they can become the theme of
a scientific investigation capable of distinguishing true (or valid)
from false
values.[17]
In this regard Sartre speaks of the
“ideality” of values, by which he means not that
they have some sort of timeless validity but that they have no real
authority and cannot be used to underwrite or justify my behavior. For
Sartre, “values derive their meaning from an original projection
of myself which stands as my choice of myself in the world.” But
if that is so, then I cannot, without circularity, appeal to values in
order to justify this very choice: “I make my decision
concerning them—without justification and without excuse”
(Sartre 1992: 78). This so-called “decisionism” has been a
hotly contested legacy of existentialism and deserves a closer look
here.

How is it that values are supposed to be grounded in freedom? By
“value” Sartre means those aspects of my experience that do not merely
causally effectuate something but rather make a claim on me: I
do not just see the homeless person but encounter him as “to be
helped”; I do not just hear the other's voice but register “a question
to be answered honestly”; I do not simply happen to sit quietly in
Church but “attend reverently”; I do not merely hear the alarm clock
but am “summoned to get up.” Values, then, as Sartre writes, appear
with the character of demands and as such they “lay claim to a
foundation” or justification (Sartre 1992: 76). Why ought I
help the homeless, answer honestly, sit reverently, or get up? Sartre
does not claim that there is no answer to these questions but only that
the answer depends, finally, on my choice of “myself” which cannot in
turn be justfied by appeal to a value. As he puts it, “value derives
its being from its exigency and not its exigency from its being.” The
exigency of value cannot be grounded in being itself, since it would
thereby lose its character as an ought; it would “cease even to be
value” since it would have the kind of exigency (contrary to freedom)
possessed by a mere cause. Thus, against then-current
value-theoretical intuitionism, Sartre denies that value can “deliver
itself to a contemplative intuition which would apprehend it as
being value and thereby would derive from it its right over my
freedom.” Instead, “it can be revealed only to an active
freedom which makes it exist as a value by the sole fact of
recognizing it as such” (Sartre 1992: 76).

For instance, I do not grasp the exigency of the alarm clock (its
character as a demand) in a kind of disinterested perception but only
in the very act of responding to it, of getting up. If I fail to get up
the alarm has, to that very extent, lost its exigency. Why
must I get up? At this point I may attempt to justify its
demand by appeal to other elements of the situation with which the
alarm is bound up: I must get up because I must go to work. From this
point of view the alarm's demand
appears—and is—justified, and such justification
will often suffice to get me going again. But the question of the
foundation of value has simply been displaced: now it is my job that,
in my active engagement, takes on the unquestioned exigency of a
demand or value. But it too derives its being as a value from its
exigency—that is, from my unreflective engagement in the overall
practice of going to work.
Ought I go to work? Why not be “irresponsible”?
If a man's got to eat, why not rather take up a life of crime? If
these questions have answers that are themselves exigent it can only
be because, at a still deeper level, I am engaged as having chosen
myself as a person of a certain sort: respectable,
responsible. From within that choice there is an answer of
what I ought to do, but outside that choice there is none—why
should I be respectable, law-abiding?—for it is only
because some choice has been made that anything at all can
appear as compelling, as making a claim on me. Only if I am
at some level engaged do values (and so justification in
terms of them) appear at all. The more I pull out of engagement toward
reflection on and questioning of my situation, the more I am
threatened by ethical anguish—“which is the recognition of
the ideality of values” (Sartre 1992: 76). And, as with all
anguish, I do not escape this situation by discovering the true order
of values but by plunging back into action. If the idea that values
are without foundation in being can be understood as a form of
nihilism, the existential response to this condition of the modern
world is to point out that meaning, value, is not first of all a
matter of contemplative theory but a consequence of engagement and
commitment.

Thus value judgments can be justified, but only relative to some
concrete and specific project. The “pattern of behavior”
of the typical bourgeois defines the meaning of
“respectability” (Sartre 1992: 77), and so it is true of
some particular bit of behavior that it is either respectable or
not. For this reason I can be in error about what I ought to do. It
may be that something that appears exigent during the course of my
unreflective engagement in the world is something that I ought not to
give in to. If, thanks to my commitment to the Resistance, a given
official appears to me as to be shot, I might nevertheless be wrong to
shoot him—if, for instance, the official was not who I thought
he was, or if killing him would in fact prove counter-productive given
my longer-term goals. Sartre's fictional works are full of
explorations of moral psychology of this sort. But I cannot extend
these “hypothetical” justifications to a point where some
purely theoretical consideration of my obligations—whether
derived from the will of God, from Reason, or from the situation
itself—could underwrite my freedom in such a way as to relieve
it of responsibility. For in order for such considerations
to count I would have to make myself the sort of person for
whom God's will, abstract Reason, or the current situation
is decisive. For existentialists like Sartre, then, I am
“the one who finally makes values exist in order to determine
[my] actions by their
demands.”[18]

Commitment—or “engagement”—is thus ultimately
the basis for an authentically meaningful life, that is, one that
answers to the existential condition of being human and does not flee
that condition by appeal to an abstract system of reason or divine
will. Yet though I alone can commit myself to some way of life, some
project, I am never alone when I do so; nor do I do so in a social,
historical, or political vaccuum. If transcendence represents my
radical freedom to define myself, facticity—that other aspect of
my being—represents the situated character of this
self-making. Because freedom as transcendence undermines the idea of a
stable, timeless system of moral norms, it is little wonder that
existential philosophers (with the exception of Simone de
Beauvoir) devoted scant energy to questions of
normative moral theory. However, because this freedom is always
socially (and thereby historically) situated, it is equally
unsurprising that their writings are greatly concerned with how our
choices and commitments are concretely contextualized in terms of
political struggles and historical reality.

For the existentialists engagement is the source of meaning and
value; in choosing myself I in a certain sense make my world. On the
other hand, I always choose myself in a context where there are others
doing the same thing, and in a world that has always already been
there. In short, my acting is situated, both socially and historically.
Thus, in choosing myself in the first-person singular, I am also
choosing in such a way that a first-person plural, a “we,” is
simultaneously constituted. Such choices make up the domain of
social reality: they fit into a pre-determined context of
roles and practices that go largely unquestioned and may be thought of
as a kind of collective identity. In social action my identity takes
shape against a background (the collective identity of the social
formation) that remains fixed. On the other hand, it can happen that my
choice puts this social formation or collective identity
itself into question: who I am to be is thus inseperable from
the question of who we are to be. Here the first-person plural
is itself the issue, and the action that results from such choices
constitutes the field of the political.

If authenticity is the category by which I am able to think about
what it means to “exist,” then, the account of authenticity cannot
neglect the social, historical, and political aspects of that
existence. Thus it is not merely because twentieth-century
existentialism flourished at a time when European history appeared to
collapse and political affairs loomed especially large that existential
philosophers devoted much attention to these matters; rather, the
demand for an account of the “situation” stems from the very character
of existence itself, which, unlike the classical “rational subject,” is
what it is only in relation to its “time.” This is not to say, however,
that existential philosophers are unanimous in their account of the
importance of historical factors or in their estimation of the
political in relation to other aspects of existence. Emmanuel Levinas,
for example, whose early work belonged within the orbit of existential
philosophy, opposed to the “horizontal” temporality of political
history a “vertical” or eschatological temporality that radically
challenged all historical meaning, while Sartre, in contrast, produced
a version of Marxist historical materialism in which existentialism
itself became a mere ideology. But we cannot stop to examine all such
differences here. Instead, we shall look at the positions of Heidegger
and Sartre, who provide opposing examples of how an authentic relation
to history and politics can be understood.

For Heidegger, to exist is to be historical. This does not mean that
one simply finds oneself at a particular moment in history, conceived
as a linear series of events. Rather, it means that selfhood has a
peculiar temporal structure that is the origin of that
“history” which subsequently comes to be narrated in terms of a series
of events. Existential temporality is not a sequence of instants but
instead a unified structure in which the “future” (that is, the
possibility aimed at in my project) recollects the “past” (that is,
what no longer needs to be done, the completed) so as to give meaning
to the “present” (that is, the things that take on significance in
light of what currently needs doing). To act, therefore, is, in
Heidegger's terms, to “historize” (geschehen), to constitute
something like a narrative unity, with beginning, middle, and end, that
does not so much take place in time as provides the
condition for linear time. To exist “between birth and death,”
then, is not merely to be present in each of a discrete series of
temporal instants but to consitute oneself in the unity of a history,
and authentic existence is thus one in which the projects that
give shape to existence are ones to which I commit myself in
light of this history. Though it belongs to, and defines, a
“moment,” choice cannot be simply “of the moment”; to be authentic I
must understand my choice in light of the potential wholeness
of my
existence.[19]

That this choice has a political dimension stems from the fact that
existence is always being-with-others. Though authenticity arises on
the basis of my being alienated, in anxiety, from the claims made by
norms belonging to the everyday life of das Man, any concrete
commitment that I make in the movement to recover myself will enlist
those norms in two ways. First, what I commit myself to will
always be derived from (though not reducible to) some
“possibility of Dasein that has been there”
(Heidegger 1962: 438): I cannot make my identity from whole cloth; I
will always understand myself in terms of some way of existing that has
been handed down within my
tradition.[20]
I “choose my hero”
(Heidegger 1962: 437) by, for instance, committing myself to a
philosophical life, which I understand on the model of Socrates, or to
a religious life, which I understand on the model of St. Francis. The
point is that I must understand myself in terms of something,
and these possibilities for understanding come from the historical
heritage and the norms that belong to it. Heidegger thinks of this
historical dimension as a kind of “fate” (Schicksal): not
something inevitable that controls my choice but something that,
inherited from my historical situation, claims me, holds a
kind of authority for me.

The second way in which the everyday norms of das Man are
enlisted in authentic choice stems from the fact that when I commit
myself to my “fate” I do so “in and with my
‘generation’” (Heidegger 1962: 436). The idea here
seems roughly to be this: To opt for a way of going on is to affirm
the norms that belong to it; and because of the nature of normativity
it is not possible to affirm norms that would
hold only for me. There is a kind of publicity and
scope in the normative such that, when I choose, I exemplify a
standard for others as well. Similarly, Heidegger holds that the
sociality of my historizing restricts what can be a genuine
“fate” or choice for me. Acting is always with
others—more specifically, with a “community” or a
“people” (Volk)—and together this
“co-historizing” responds to a “destiny”
(Geschick) which has guided our fates in advance (Heidegger
1962: 436). Not everything is really possible for us, and an authentic
choice must strive to respond to the claim that history makes on the
people with whom one belongs, to seize its “destiny.” Along
this communitarian axis, then, existential historicality can open out
onto the question of politics: who are “we” to be?

Heidegger suggests that it was this concept of historicality that
underwrote his own concrete political engagement during the period of
National Socialism in Germany. Disgusted with the political situation
in Weimar Germany and characterizing it as especially irresolute or
inauthentic, Heidegger looked upon Hitler's movement as a way of
recalling the German people back to their “ownmost”
possibility—i.e., a way for Germany to constitute itself
authentically as an alternative to the political models of Russia and
the United States. Heidegger's choice to intervene in university
politics at this time was thus both a choice of himself—in which
he chose his hero: Plato's “philosopher-king” (see Arendt
1978)—and a choice for his “generation.” Much is
controversial about Heidegger's engagement for National Socialism (not
least whether he drew the appropriate consequences from his own
concept of authenticity), but it provides a clear example of a kind of
existential politics that depends on an ability to “tell
time”—that is, to sense the imperatives of one's factic
historical situation. Heidegger later became very suspicious of this
sort of existential politics. Indeed, for the idea of authenticity as
resolute commitment he substituted the idea of a
“releasement” (Gelassenheit) and for engagement
the stance of “waiting.” He came to believe that the
problems that face us (notably, the dominance of technological ways of
thinking) have roots that lie deeper than can be addressed through
politics directly. He thus famously denied that democracy was
sufficient to deal with the political crisis posed by technology,
asserting that “only a god can save us” (Heidegger
1981: 55, 57). But even here, in keeping with the existential notion of
historicity, Heidegger's recommendations turn on a reading of history,
of the meaning of our time.

A very different reading, and a very different recommendation, can be
found in the work of Sartre. The basis for Sartre's reading of
history, and his politics, was laid in that section of Being and
Nothingness that describes the birth of the social in the
“Look”(le regard) of the other. In making me an
object for his projects, the other alienates me from myself, displaces
me from the subject position (the position from which the world is
defined in its meaning and value) and constitutes me as
something. Concretely, what I am constituted “as” is a
function of the other's project and not something that I can make
myself be. I am constituted as a “Frenchman” in and
through the hostility emanating from that German; I am constituted as
a “man” in the resentment of that woman; I am constituted
as a “Jew” on the basis of the other's anti-semitism; and
so on. This sets up a dimension of my being that I can neither control
nor disavow, and my only recourse is to wrench myself away from the
other in an attempt to restore myself to the subject-position. For
this reason, on Sartre's model, social reality is in perpetual
conflict—an Hegelian dialectic in which, for ontological
reasons, no state of mutual recognition can ever be achieved. The
“we”—the political subject—is always
contested, conflicted, unstable.

But this instability does have a certain structure, one which Sartre,
steeped in the Marxism of inter-war French thought (Alexandre
Kojève, Jean Hyppolite), explored in terms of a certain
historical materialism. For social relations take place not only
between human beings but also within institutions that have developed
historically and that enshrine relations of power and domination. Thus
the struggle for who will take the subject position is not carried out
on equal terms. As Simone de Beauvoir demonstrated in detail in her
book, The Second Sex, the historical and institutional place
of women is defined in such a way that they are consigned to a kind of
permanent “object” status—they are the
“second” sex since social norms are defined in male
terms. This being so, a woman's struggle to develop self-defining
projects is constrained by a permanent institutional
“Look” that already defines her as “woman,”
whereas a man need not operate under constraints of gender; he feels
himself to be simply “human,” pure subjectivity. Employing
similar insights in reflection on the situations of ethnic and
economic oppression, Sartre sought a way to derive political
imperatives in the face of the groundlessness of moral values entailed
by his view of the ideality of values.

At first, Sartre argued that there was one value—namely
freedom itself—that did have a kind of universal
authority. To commit oneself to anything is also always to commit
oneself to the value of freedom. In “Existentialism is a Humanism”
Sartre tried to establish this by way of a kind of transcendental
argument, but he soon gave up that strategy and pursued the more modest
one of claiming that the writer must always engage “on the
side of freedom.” According to the theory of “engaged literature”
expounded in What is Literature?, in creating a literary world
the author is always acting either to imagine paths toward overcoming
concrete unfreedoms such as racism and capitalist exploitation, or else
closing them off. In the latter case, he is contradicting himself,
since the very idea of writing presupposes the freedom of the reader,
and that means, in principle, the whole of the reading public. Whatever
the merits of this argument, it does suggest the political value to
which Sartre remained committed throughout his life: the value of
freedom as self-making.

This commitment finally led Sartre to hold that existentialism itself
was only an “ideological” moment within Marxism, which he
termed “the one philosophy of our time which we cannot go
beyond” (Sartre 1968:xxxiv). As this statement suggests,
Sartre's embrace of Marxism was a function of his sense of history as
the factic situation in which the project of self-making takes
place. Because existing is self-making (action),
philosophy—including existential philosophy—cannot be
understood as a disinterested theorizing about timeless essences but
is always already a form of engagement, a diagnosis of the past and a
projection of norms appropriate to a different future in light of
which the present takes on significance. It therefore always arises
from the historical-political situation and is a way of intervening in
it. Marxism, like existentialism, makes this necessarily practical
orientation of philosophy explicit.

From the beginning existentialism saw itself in this activist way
(and this provided the basis for the most serious disagreements among
French existentialists such as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Camus, many
of which were fought out in the pages of the journal founded by Sartre
and Merleau-Ponty, Les Temps Modernes). But the later Sartre
came to hold that a philosophy of self-making could not content itself
with highlighting the situation of individual choice; an authentic
political identity could only emerge from a theory that
situated such choice in a practically oriented analysis of its concrete
situation. Thus it appeard to him that the “ideology of existence” was
itself merely an alienated form of the deeper analysis of social and
historical reality provided by Marx's dialectical approach. In focusing
on the most important aspects of the material condition in which the
existential project of self-making takes place—namely, economic
relations under conditions of scarcity—Marx's critique of
capital offered a set of considerations that no “philosophy of freedom”
could ignore, considerations that would serve to orient political
engagement until such time as “there will exist for everyone a
margin of real freedom beyond the production of life” (Sartre
1968: 34). Marxism is unsurpassable, therefore, because it is the most
lucid theory of our alienated situation of concrete unfreedom, oriented
toward the practical-political overcoming of that unfreedom.

Sartre's relation to orthodox Marxism was marked by tension, however,
since he held that existing Marxism had abandoned the promise of its
dialectical approach to social reality in favor of a dogmatic
“apriorism” that subsumed historical reality under a
blanket of lifeless abstractions. He thus undertook his Critique
of Dialectical Reason to restore the promise of Marxism by
reconceiving its concept of praxis in terms of the
existential notion of project. What had become a rigid
economic determinism would be restored to dialectical fluidity by
recalling the existential doctrine of self-making: it is true that man
is “made” by history, but at the same time he is making
that very history. This attempt to “reconquer man within
Marxism” (Sartre 1968: 83)—i.e., to develop a method which
would preserve the concrete details of human reality as lived
experience—was not well received by orthodox
Marxists. Sartre's fascination with the details of Flaubert's life, or
the life of Baudelaire, smacked too much of “bourgeois
idealism.” But we see here how Sartre's politics, like
Heidegger's, derived from his concept of history: there are no
iron-clad laws that make the overthrow of capitalism the
inevitable outcome of economic forces; there are only men in situation
who make history as they are made by it. Dialectical materialism is
the unsurpassable philosophy of those who choose, who commit
themselves to, the value of freedom. The political claim that Marxism
has on us, then, would rest upon the ideological enclave within it:
authentic existence as choice.

Authentic existence thus has an historical, political dimension; all
choice will be attentive to history in the sense of contextualizing
itself in some temporally narrative understanding of its place. But
even here it must be admitted that what makes existence authentic is
not the correctness of the narrative understanding it adopts.
Authenticity does not depend on some particular substantive
view of history, some particular theory or empirical story. From this
point of view, the substantive histories adopted by existential
thinkers as different as Heidegger and Sartre should perhaps be read
less as scientific accounts, defensible in third-person terms, than as
articulations of the historical situation from the perspective of what
that situation is taken to demand, given the engaged commitment of
their authors. They stand, in other words, less as
justifications for their authors' existential and political
commitments than as themselves a form of politics: invitations
to others to see things as the author sees them, so that the author's
commitment to going on in a certain way will come to be shared.

As a cultural movement, existentialism belongs to the past. As a
philosophical inquiry that introduced a new norm, authenticity, for
understanding what it means to be human—a norm tied to a
distinctive, post-Cartesian concept of the self as practical, embodied,
being-in-the-world—existentialism has continued to play an
important role in contemporary thought in both the continental and
analytic traditions. The Society for Phenomenology and Existential
Philosophy, as well as societies devoted to Heidegger, Sartre,
Merleau-Ponty, Jaspers, Beauvoir, and other existential philosophers,
provide a forum for ongoing work—both of a historical,
scholarly nature and of more systematic focus—that derives from
classical existentialism, often bringing it into confrontation with
more recent movements such as structuralism, deconstruction,
hermeneutics, and feminism. In the area of gender studies Judith Butler
(1990) draws importantly on existential sources, as does Lewis Gordon
(1995) in the area of race theory (see also Bernasconi 2003). Matthew
Ratcliffe (2008) develops an existential approach to psychopathology.

Interest in a narrative conception
of self-identity—for instance, in the work of Charles Taylor
(1999), Paul Ricoeur, David Carr (1986), or Charles Guignon—has
its roots in the existential revision of Hegelian notions of
temporality and its critique of rationalism. Hubert Dreyfus (1979)
developed an influential criticism of the Artificial Intelligence
program drawing essentially upon the existentialist idea, found
especially in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, that the human world, the
world of meaning, must be understood first of all as a function of our
embodied practices and cannot be represented as a logically structured
system of representations. Calling for a “new existentialism,” John
Haugeland (1998) has explored the role of existential commitment in
scientific practices as truth-tracking practices. In a series of books,
Michael Gelven (e.g., 1990, 1997) has reflected upon the distinctions between
existential, moral, and epistemological or logical dimensions of
experience, showing how the standards appropriate to each intertwine,
without reducing to any single one. A revival of interest in moral
psychology finds many writers who are taking up the question of
self-identity and responsibility in ways that recall the existential
themes of self-making and choice—for instance, Christine
Korsgaard (1996) appeals crucially to notions of “self-constitution” and
“practical identity”; Richard Moran (2001) emphasizes the connection
between self-avowal and the first-person perspective in a way that
derives in part from Sartre; and Thomas Nagel has followed the
existentialist line in connecting meaning to the consciousness of
death. Even if such writers tend to proceed with more confidence in the
touchstone of rationality than did the classical existentialists, their
work operates on the terrain opened up by the earlier thinkers.

In
addition, after years of being out of fashion in France, existential
motifs have once again become prominent in the work of leading
thinkers. Foucault's embrace of a certain concept of freedom, and his
exploration of the “care of the self,” recall debates within
existentialism, as does Derrida's recent work on religion without God
and his reflections on the concepts of death, choice, and
responsibility. In very different ways, the books by Cooper (1999) and
Alan Schrift (1995) suggest that a re-appraisal of the legacy of
existentialism is an important agenda item of contemporary
philosophy. Reynolds (2006), for instance, concludes his introduction
to existentialism with a consideration of how post-structuralists such
as Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault extend certain reflections found in
Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger, while Reynolds (2004) does the same, in
more detail for Derrida and Merleau-Ponty. If existentialism's very
notoriety as a cultural movement may have impeded its serious
philosophical reception, then, it may be that what we have most to
learn from existentialism still lies before us.

There are, in fact, reasons to think that such a re-evaluation is
currently underway. Several publications that have appeared since the
last revision of this article (2010) take up the challenge of bringing
existential thought into dialogue with items on the contemporary
philosophical agenda. Edward Baring (2011) exhumes the historical
relation between Derrida and existentialism and finds a kind of
“'Christian' existentialism” in Derrida's work prior to
1952, traces of which are discernible in his later thinking. The
collection edited by Judaken and Bernasconi (2012) explores the
historical context of existentialist writings informed by contemporary
critiques of canonization, while Margaret Simons (2013) re-evaluates
the role of Beauvoir, and of feminist thought, in the origins of
existentialism itself. In 2011 The Continuum Companion to
Existentialism appeared (Joseph, Reynolds, and Woodward 2011),
followed by The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism
(Crowell 2012). Articles in both volumes are committed to showing the
systematic relevance of existential concepts and approaches for
contemporary work in philosophy and other fields. Finally, Aho (2014)
highlights how, in areas as diverse as cognitive science, psychiatry,
health care, and environmental philosophy, “the legacy of
existentialism is alive and well” (2014: 140).

The bibliography is divided into two sections; taken together, they
provide a representative sample of existentialist writing. The first
includes books that are cited in the body of the article. The second
contains supplementary reading, including works that have been
mentioned in the article, selected works by some of the figures
mentioned in the first paragraph of the article, certain classical
readings in existentialism, and more recent studies of relevance to the
issues discussed. The bibliography is, somewhat arbitrarily, limited to
works in English, and no attempt at comprehensiveness has been made.
For detailed bibliographies of the major existentialists, including
critical studies, the reader is referred to the entries devoted to the
individual philosophers. I invite readers to suggest new and noteworthy
sources for inclusion here.